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Argentine Judge Seeks to Put Franco Officials on Trial

MADRID — Spain, whose judges have aggressively pursued human rights abuse cases far beyond its borders, finds itself on the receiving end of such an inquest, as an Argentine judge seeks to extradite and try Spanish police officials accused of torturing opponents of the regime under Francisco Franco, the dictator who died in 1975.

Spaniards claiming to be victims of the abuses filed a lawsuit in Buenos Aires in 2010, after getting nowhere in Spain because of a 1977 amnesty law meant to smooth Spain’s return to democracy.

When the Argentine judge in the case, María Romilda Servini de Cubría, issued arrest warrants recently for four former Spanish officials, she relied on the same principle of universal jurisdiction for human rights issues that the crusading Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón invoked in the 1990s when he tried to prosecute Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator.

Two of the four are dead, but the other two — Jesús Muñecas and Antonio González Pacheco — are expected to be summoned soon by a Spanish judge.

Even if Spain refuses to extradite the men, the request alone is “a very important moral sanction on the Franco regime, which also shows Franco’s victims that they can count on international support,” said Victoria Sanford, professor of anthropology at City University of New York.

The Spanish government has refrained from commenting on the extradition request while it awaits a decision from Spain’s national court. As it happens, that decision is now in the hands of Judge Pablo Ruz, who took the place of Mr. Garzón three years ago after Mr. Garzón was suspended and eventually removed from the court for using illegal eavesdropping methods. Mr. Garzón had also tried to investigate crimes committed during the Spanish civil war and the ensuing Franco dictatorship, among other politically delicate cases.

Judge Ruz is also in charge of Spain’s most important political corruption case, centering on whether a former treasurer of the governing Popular Party, Luis Bárcenas, used a slush fund to make illegal payments to senior party officials, including Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. On Monday, Judge Ruz widened that case by indicting an architect who remodeled the party’s headquarters, amid suspicions that he was paid under the table for his work.

Whatever the political sensitivities in Spain, Ana Messuti, an Argentine international criminal lawyer who has been leading the Buenos Aires case against the Franco officials, said the recent arrest warrants should be viewed as a first step. “We’re trying to build up a mega-case that should reach a mega-result, and demonstrate that Spain had a regime that carried out something akin to genocide against a whole segment of its own population,” Ms. Messuti said.

The case is ruffling feathers in Spain, where it is seen as Argentine meddling in Spanish affairs. The two governments were at odds last year after Argentina nationalized YPF, an oil company mainly owned by the Spanish energy giant Repsol, and Repsol claimed at least $10.5 billion in compensation.

Spanish courts have pursued several former Argentine military officers for abuses committed during Argentina’s “dirty war,” under a legal concept called universal jurisdiction, allowing the prosecution in Spain of anyone from any country who commits crimes like genocide or terrorism anywhere in the world. One such case involved Adolfo Scilingo, accused of throwing prisoners to their deaths from planes and other abuses as an Argentine Navy captain. He was convicted of crimes against humanity in 2005 and was sentenced to 640 years in prison.

José Galán, a Spanish lawyer who represented victims of Argentina’s military dictatorship in that case, said that Argentina’s extradition request meant that “we’re now getting back the favor that we did to Argentina by putting an end to this notion of complete impunity.”

Mr. Galán said Argentina’s extradition request was “a real headache” for the prime minister’s conservative People’s Party, many of whose members Mr. Galán said were “the real heirs of Francoism.” But he also noted that Spain did little to confront its darker past even under Socialist administrations, and that it resisted calls by human rights groups and Mr. Gárzon to set up an independent truth commission to investigate crimes committed under Franco.

Spanish law does not provide for extradition of Spanish citizens to other countries unless their citizenship was obtained fraudulently, according to Javier Cremades, chairman of Cremades & Calvo-Sotelo, a Spanish law firm. And the Argentine case seemed unlikely to progress anyway, Mr. Cremades said, because “Spain’s amnesty law has already resolved the legal and political issues linked to the Franco period.”

But Unión Progresista de Fiscales, a left-leaning association of Spanish prosecutors, issued a statement welcoming Argentina’s attempt to make amends for “the lamentable performance of our judicial system” concerning the crimes of the Franco era. “We hope the Spanish government will live up to the circumstances,” it added.

A group of victims of the Franco dictatorship held a news conference in Madrid last week to detail some of the abuses they said they suffered at the hands of the officials Argentina sought to prosecute, in particular Mr. González Pacheco. Jesús Rodríguez Barrio, an economics professor, said that Mr. González Pacheco held a gun to his head to force him to sign a statement saying he was a Trotskyist activist.

“What is happening in Argentina is one of the last opportunities” to bring the Franco regime to justice, Mr. Rodríguez Barrio said at the news conference. “We still have a generation of victims who can talk, but most of our torturers were older than us, so time is running out.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 2, 2013, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Argentina Seeks Spanish Officials’ Extradition for Franco-Era Abuses. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe